In the past two years, Reuben A. Buford May, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent a lot of time waiting in lines at Chicago nightclubs. When he gets to the front, he never knows how much, exactly, the bouncer is going to tell him to pay to enter. May, who previously wrote a book about urban nightlife and is researching another, has seen bouncers let in a series of white patrons for free, then charge a group of Black patrons, then allow the next group of white people to get in for free again. “I have literally been in line and was the next person to enter the nightclub and suddenly the price goes up,” May, who is Black, told me. “Is this about race or about profit?”

The unfortunate answer is probably both. Cover charges, which in May’s experience usually hover from $10 to $20 and are generally paid to a bouncer, occupy a strange space in the U.S.: In many places, they can be flagrantly discriminatory, yet legally permitted. They might shift based on the time of night as well as the demeanor, outfit, and physical characteristics of the person in line. Although racial discrimination certainly happens in nightlife—“It’s clear to me that the race of the patron influences what the bouncer charges,” May said—proving that a specific cover charge is discriminatory because of prejudice against a protected class is also complicated. At a club, most people already understand that they will be judged for their appearance.

In the larger economy, there’s pretty much nothing else like cover charges. Airlines and Airbnbs use variable pricing models, where the cost of a seat or a stay fluctuates with demand. Time-based promotions are common too: If you arrive at IHOP at 3 p.m., you can score a discount on pancakes. But these deals are, in theory, unbiased—anyone can be entitled to a discount. What makes nightlife unique is how personal, arbitrary, and sometimes humiliating these charges may be. You are intimately scrutinized, and then you have to pay according to how desirable your presence is to the venue.

Cover charges, along with dress codes, are essentially the levers by which nightlife venues curate people—or outright reject them. This price discrimination is perhaps tolerated only because the promise of a highly selective experience is why many people show up in the first place.

Since their inception in New York at the start of the 20th century, cover charges have offered a dual benefit to nightclub owners: a way to maximize profits while also screening out the patrons they don’t want. In October 1926, for example, a columnist for The New Yorker complained that “the five-dollar couvert, with no frills, is to be an ordinary occurrence” across the city. Venue owners seemed to be using cover charges as a way to keep out nonwealthy clientele. They were not subtle about it either. In 1936, Fortune magazine described how the famed Manhattan nightclub El Morocco used an “elastic cover charge” to “separate the chic from the goats.” To cultivate an air of exclusivity, El Morocco charged different covers to different patrons based on “how much you spend, how regularly you come, who you are, and whether they wanna discourage you coming back altogether,” according to a contemporaneous report in Variety.

As crude as the cover-charge policy of El Morocco might sound, it is not out of step with how the fees function today: What you pay often boils down to how desirable of an addition you are to the venue. “It’s just based on your look or your vibe,” Jason Beahm, a defense lawyer who, among other specialties, focuses on festivals and nightlife, told me. Many club operators are not shy about the fact that they are filtering customers. When the New York Post interviewed bouncers who work at high-end venues, they described their ideal patrons as a “mature, martini-drinking crowd,” as well as those with “distinctive looks,” “high fashion,” and the ability to make a space “more sexy, more elegant, more fun.” To discourage people in their early 20s, whom it associated with disorder, from entering, one Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, bar has even charged young people extra. Many a service-journalism article has been devoted to getting into Berghain, Berlin’s most exclusive nightclub.

[Read: New York literally invented nightlife]

A close curation of patrons can, and often does, lead to discrimination against people of color, disabled people, and queer people. One of the few ways that variable cover charges can become illegal is when they involve a provable pattern of targeting people belonging to protected classes. In 2016, for instance, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the Houston club Gaslamp for repeatedly charging a $20 cover to people of color while allowing white people to enter for free. (The suit was eventually settled.) The problem with proving discrimination at clubs is that dress codes can easily be used as an alibi for it. In a 2021 paper, the legal scholar Shaun Ossei-Owusu called cover charges and dress codes part of a regime of “velvet rope discrimination,” referring to a series of norms that exclude women, queer people, and racial minorities from certain nightlife venues.

For example, dress-code policies have resulted in nightclubs turning away Black people for having dreadlocks, and refusing queer and trans people for wearing makeup. When one Texas man was barred from a club for wearing makeup and false eyelashes, employees told him that “men need to dress like men,” Ossei-Owusu recounted in his paper. This spring, a gay club in Washington, D.C., was criticized for banning high heels, a policy that seemed designed to exclude women, trans people, and drag queens. (The club has since dropped the policy.)

Yet besides defending protected classes, meaningful policies governing cover charges and dress codes are largely absent from the legal landscape. If you see cover-charge laws bubble up in the news, it is probably for one reason: Men’s-rights activists have spent years suing states over establishments that charge women less than men to enter, a common promotion designed to make a nightclub more desirable … to men. In California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Wisconsin, differential charges based on gender are illegal; in states such as Washington and Illinois, by contrast, courts found no issue with them. These promotions aside, states have very little to say on how cover charges are levied, or how much they can be.

One of the rare exceptions is Massachusetts, which requires any business that receives a liquor license to ensure that a sign with letters of at least one inch in height is “conspicuously posted,” at every entrance, noting how much the cover is if one is required. Violating the law is punishable by a small fine of up to $50. The Massachusetts state Senate passed the regulation in 1951—not to prevent discrimination but, apparently, to protect the dignity of men wooing their girlfriends. A sign out front was needed, one state senator said, because “if a man goes into a place, and then finds a big cover or minimum charge, it’s too embarrassing to get up and leave, if he’s with a girl friend.”

In the intervening decades, few other states or municipalities followed that state’s lead. Perhaps one reason is that these tools of exclusion in nightlife, as profoundly as they can be used to harm, can also have some upsides for patrons. Cover charges and dress codes have even been used to keep nightclubs safe for communities who are discriminated against in other contexts. At one London party for queer people of color, for instance, bouncers ask anyone who doesn’t visibly seem to belong to these communities “how they identify and why they were coming,” an organizer explained to Dazed. At some parties, you have to apply to attend.

Curation is a central component of nightlife. Nightclubs are facilitators of a shared, communal experience; shaping that community requires a degree of exclusion. You go to a death-metal night, and you expect the metalheads to turn out. You go to a queer club, and you expect a mix of sexualities and genders. “Nightclubs in and of themselves are places of exclusion,” May, the University of Illinois professor, said. “They are focused on selecting people out that deserve the right to be a part of that entertainment.”

This tension sits unresolved: The certainty that you’ll share a connection with the crowd is part of the reason that good nightclubs feel so thrilling, but those same curation mechanisms keep people out unfairly. Still, to hold nightclubs accountable for prejudice, visible cover charges would be a vital start. If a sign announces the price, a club will at least have to own its decision to bar someone from entry, rather than hide behind a made-up fee.

The year was 2020, and schools abruptly closed. Kids Zoomed into kindergarten, and someone had to supervise them. Disproportionately, that task fell—because of course it did—to moms. So out of necessity, the moms quit their jobs. Thus began America’s first female recession.

Beyond the immediate trauma of job and income loss, economists worried that this “she-cession” would scar female employment for the long term. The thinking was that once women stepped back from the workforce, reentering would be difficult or impossible.

But that appears not to have happened. Recently, the she-cession largely ended—or, at least, women’s employment has seen a robust recov-her-y. (Sorry.) In fact, remote work appears to have allowed mothers of young children in particular to join the workforce in record numbers.

[Read: The professional women who are leaning out]

Nearly as many women are working now as before the coronavirus pandemic. Women’s labor-force participation was 57.9 percent in February 2020 and 57.7 percent last month. So-called prime-age women—those from 25 to 54—are working in even greater numbers: More than 77.6 percent of them are in the workforce, compared with 77 percent before the pandemic.

Perhaps more surprising is the group of women whose employment has rebounded the most: Women whose youngest child is under 5 are “powering the pack’s upward trajectory,” a recent Brookings Institution report found. In particular, mothers of young kids who are highly educated, married, and/or foreign-born are working in greater numbers today than before the pandemic. “Labor force participation among mothers with young children who have at least a bachelor’s degree has exceeded its pre-pandemic peak,” the Brookings-report authors, Lauren Bauer and Sarah Yu Wang, write.

The rebound has been so dramatic that, when I emailed Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas, she emailed back, “What she-cession.” To be sure, women’s employment did suffer in the pandemic’s early days: Women’s jobs accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million jobs that were lost in April 2020, in part because service workers, who are disproportionately female, were laid off in large numbers, and in part because the closure of schools and child care meant that many women stopped working. The pandemic quickly wiped out nearly a decade’s worth of progress in women’s employment.

Now, though, we’re coming off of “hot mom summer,” as Heggeness put it—by which she means high levels of female employment, of course. Several things seem to be driving women back to the workforce. Inflation is high, and student-loan payments are restarting, so many families simply need more money to cover expenses. The labor market is tight, so many women can find jobs with relative ease and negotiate for terms that feel favorable. Child care has finally mostly reopened, so women who want to work are no longer stuck without someone to watch their kids. Also, the pandemic acted as a stress test of sorts, proving to families that they can do hard things. The thinking among many women, as Brookings’s Bauer told me, was something like “the pandemic sucked, but now I can get through anything.”

Another big factor seems to be remote work. Bauer and Wang point out that mothers of young children who have a bachelor’s degree or higher are the most likely group of workers to be teleworking, and married mothers of young kids are among the likeliest groups to be teleworking. These are also the groups that have made the biggest gains in labor-force participation since the pandemic: More than 40 percent of college-educated mothers with young kids teleworked at least one day a week in the early part of this year. “That is so high,” Bauer told me.

Several other data points prop up the idea that remote work is helping women rejoin the workforce. Women’s employment rebounded especially quickly in New England and California, where many jobs can be performed remotely, compared with the Midwest, where in-person manufacturing work is more common. Nearly a dozen women interviewed by The Washington Post recently said that a combination of rising prices and workplace flexibility had prompted them to get jobs.

Across Europe and America, work-from-home days have quadrupled since the start of the pandemic, and 35 percent of Americans who can do their jobs from home now work remotely all the time, compared with 7 percent before the pandemic. Last year, women were more likely to work remotely than men were, and women are generally more interested in remote jobs than men are. Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told me that surveys the job site conducted show that 54 percent of men and 69 percent of women are interested in remote jobs. “Work-from-home is by far the largest change to have happened in the labor market,” Nick Bloom, a Stanford economist who studies remote work, told me.

About 90 percent of the candidate pool at the staffing firm FlexProfessionals is female, says Maura Connelly, the company’s senior recruiting manager. Their preference for remote work is overwhelming: Though some are interested in hybrid work, “nobody I talked to wants to be on site five days a week,” she told me. “Nobody.” The candidates say they want to be able to meet the bus when their kid gets home, or drive the occasional carpool. Connelly says many women might have returned to work recently because the pandemic showed them that remote work is out there—that it exists, and that they could get those jobs.

Though families must still pay for child care when parents work remotely, remote work allows them to pay for less child care. Instead of leaving the house for your commute at 7 and returning at 6, you’re rolling to your home office at 8 and “returning” from it at 5. That’s two fewer hours of babysitter coverage every day.

Kerri Sterowski’s son was just a few months old when the pandemic began, and working full-time didn’t feel safe or practical for her. Instead, she helped watch a friend’s child and did some part-time work remotely. She returned to full-time work in August 2022 because she lives in expensive Northern Virginia and her family was feeling financially pinched. Still, she turned down jobs that would have required her to be in the office most of the time, because she wanted to be around in case her son was sick or had a half-day at school. “If I were to have a job in person, then I would be missing out on a lot of my son’s life,” she told me.

Remote work might also have encouraged new mothers who would otherwise have left the workforce to instead stay in. Rather than see themselves trapped in an office all day, they might have figured out that they can breastfeed around Zoom meetings and knock out memos at naptime. After Mozi Nolte’s daughter was born in October 2020, she and her husband spent two years taking care of her at home, without paid child care, while working full-time. She was worried about the infection risk, and she also wanted to save $2,000 a month on day care. It was hard: Her bosses were very understanding, but there were times when she was on a conference call, changing a diaper, and pumping at the same time.

Now Nolte has child care, but she would never consider a job that requires five days a week in the office. She goes in two days a week, but it takes her an hour and a half each way to get to her office. Doing that every day, “it’s three hours when I could pick my daughter up and do laundry, play with her. The quality of life is just not worth it,” she says.

[Read: The other work remote workers get done]

What’s less clear is whether remote work will continue to boom, and women’s employment along with it. There are currently not as many remote-job openings as there are job seekers who want to work remotely. But Bloom believes the work-from-home trend is shaped like a Nike swoosh: There was an initial post-pandemic drop as even Zoom called some of its employees back to the office a few days a week, and now we’re in the fat, flat part of the swoosh. But soon, he thinks, the trend will be on its way up again as technology improves. Beyond videoconferencing, he envisions a future of virtual reality and holograms that would allow you to interact with colleagues in 3-D. What’s more, newer companies that have always been remote will expand and inspire others, he believes, so the norm may shift away from big offices.

Working remotely has some downsides: A spread-out workforce makes mentorship more difficult, so if women are flocking to remote work, they might lose out on valuable networking and learning opportunities. And it’s not clear that remote work is sufficient to keep women in the labor force. Pandemic-era child-care funding is set to end this month, which might cause some day-care centers to close and some parents to step back from work again. You might not need as much child care when you work remotely, but you do need some.

If the remote-work trend continues, though, and women’s employment stays high, it might mean that in the future, women will face less of a “motherhood penalty” for taking time off when their children are born. “If there are more women who can stay on the track that they were [on] prior to having a baby, or closer to an ideal track,” Bauer said, “then that sets their whole family and her on a different trajectory in terms of her participation, earnings, and career ladder.” Far from a she-cession, we might see a future of prosp-her-ity.